


this valley of dying stars

by deckards



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 06:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8479141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: everything ends --- it’s not easy, living with ghosts.(companion piece to this is the way the world ends)





	

**Author's Note:**

> this piece is meant to complement the one linked above, but they both exist independently of each other, so while i would of course love for you to read both, that really isn’t necessary.

 

 

> everything i’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
> 
> \---- david foster wallace

 

What she remembers most is the feel of him, is his face next to hers, the way the course grain of his stubble pulled against her cheek and how the soft bristles of his mustache whispered across her lip. Alone in a rebel cave, hiding in the thick darkness of her own dimension, it’s sometimes hard not to dwell on times that were. There is so much silence here and the emptiness rings in her ears. She longs for a white noise to dull the sharp edges of her recollections. But there is only the muted thump of her blood and the gentle hiss of her respiration. These noises should be enough, but they are fickle and betray her; they remind her of his heart beating against her back, his breath on the nape of her neck smelling of peppermint and jasmine and acrid tea leaves.

It often struck her as odd, the way he would insist on physical closeness at times. Such an aloof, standoffish figure, wrapped around her like a shawl. The ragged blanket she has now is a poor substitute for the warmth he radiated, the clanging of falling rocks a pale imitation of his laugh.

She smiles, picturing the sound, the rough rasp so few people ever hear.

When she was still learning her way around Earth, Stephen insisted on showing her films. At first she protested; if she was going to learn she might as well go outside or read one of his hundreds of books. But he was characteristically stubborn and so she, eventually, acquiesced.

“When I was growing up,” he said, “I used to ride my bike into town and sneak into the theatre. I first saw this one when I was thirteen. It’s always been one of my favourites.” She wasn’t convinced, but Wong had made a large bowl of an intriguing new food, called popcorn, and Stephen looked remarkably earnest, smiling almost nervously while he spoke.

The film was in black and white and it ended poorly for everyone; Clea hadn’t much cared for its depressing characters or their fixation with insurance fraud and murder. Her opinion wasn’t helped by Wong retiring to an armchair off to the side of the room, keeping the popcorn largely to himself. She’d only had five or six pieces—hardly enough to decide if she liked it or not.

“Well?” Stephen asked.

She said, “Couldn’t you have picked something more colourful?”

He laughed and scrunched up his nose, then kissed her on the forehead and said, “As you wish.”

The next week he presented her with something much brighter. It was a love story between a farm boy and a princess, but he called it a fairy tale. When it ended, he mumbled into her neck, “I grew up on a farm, you know.”

After that, movie night became a regular staple of life in the Sanctum, so long as there was no imminent disaster to prevent it. Wednesday evenings she would lie on the couch and Stephen would wind himself around her and Wong would eat his bowl of popcorn and the three of them would watch a film, generally whatever Stephen chose. Every so often he would insist on one of his drab, dire black and white films, _Sunset Boulevard_ or _The Postman Always Rings Twice_. Once he even tried to get away with screening _Double Indemnity_ again, somehow convinced that this time Clea would enjoy it. She didn’t. There was no appeal for her in the desperate, wanton deeds of those people and their colourless lives, and when she tried to get Stephen to explain his fascination with them he shrugged and muttered something about nostalgia. That was the way it went with him; he’d be there one minute and gone the next, though he could be standing beside her the entire time. It was wearying living with the constant portent of absence, like a lip of frost encroaching on her soul.

It’s never cold here, not like it is on earth, but Clea can feel a chill seeping into the air. The darkling gloom outside is the colour of a fresh bruise, deep purple with shades of brown, and what little specs of light remain to the day cast long, dark shadows that fall across the rocky landscape like grasping hands. Time moves slowly here, flowing in a different way than it does on earth. Years there slip by here and she barely notices.

The war she is fighting has been raging for so long, there isn’t a unit of measurement she can trust to quantify its length. Battles blur into one another, a monotone of violence and defeat punctuated by small victories, brief respites marked by toothy smiles. This is her home, but increasingly she feels as much an outcast here as she did in his world. If there is no place she can truly belong, she will build herself a new world.

And so her rebellion carries on.

In the quiet moments between defending the universe, Stephen was gone as often as he was home: out making house calls or wandering the astral plane or locked in his study—there, but beyond reach. Clea grew accustomed to the loneliness and for a time, the gnawing unease that crept beneath her skin was tolerable. The desire to leave came in increments, doled out slowly over days and months and years. She thinks it was less a wish to go than a need to find an anchor, to not feel constantly adrift in the lives of those who held stronger ties. She returned to the Dark Dimension to learn it wasn’t hers anymore. Perhaps it never had been, not even when she had ruled it.

Before their fighting started, the brutal jabs and declarations, the smoldering demarcations that etched out lines of silence and repressed hostility, Clea discovered a hidden cache of children’s movies. Stephen protested, but she had her way in the end. The movies were charming and vibrant and full of song, and there was enough darkness in their lives; she was determined to delight in the strange, nonsensical cartoons. He seemed willing enough to indulge her, though he insisted on complaining each and every time.

“You know,” he said one Wednesday evening, “you can just read the classical version of these stories in a book.”

She snuggled against him on the sofa and said, “Yes, but I like the songs.”

He maneuvered his face next to hers so she could see his pout and smell the tea on his breath. “ _I_ don’t like the songs. Can I be excused?”

“No you may not,” she said, digging her elbow against his sternum. “Stop fidgeting; I’m trying to watch this.”

He huffed, but relented, until about halfway through when he said, “Well this is ridiculous. You can’t honestly believe that she’d fall in love with a beast, can you?”

From across the room, Wong swallowed a mouthful of popcorn and said said, “Doctor Strange, please.”

“I married you, didn’t I?” Clea said.

“Excuse me?” Stephen said.

“You heard me.”

“I’m not that hairy.”

“No but your manners are atrocious. Any gentleman would know better than to scold a lady during a film.”

She felt him laugh against her neck and she smiled as Belle and her Beast danced across the screen. His arm was draped across her waist. She traced patterns across the back of his hand, memorizing the lines of veins and bones and scars and screws. It was a year before she saw his hands without spells or gloves, longer still until he stopped flinching when she touched them.

Her fingers brush across the rocks that keep her company in the cave, trailing over the broken crags and rugged corners. Outside it starts raining. Spitting at first, a few heavy drops that splatter across the ground like blood. Then more and more, until it’s falling in sheets, curtaining the entrance to her cave. A fine mist and some wayward splashes encroach on her nest; Clea moves deeper into the cave.

Stephen was in the shower. She could hear the water slapping across the glass and his voice echoing around the room. Clea pushed her way into the bathroom, frowning, convinced she had made a mistake. But there it was, clear as anything, Stephen’s voice singing. She listened for a moment, then smiled and opened the shower door.

“...will be worth my while. I will go most anywhere to fi _aaaaaaaaagh!_ ”

She laughed, warm water running down her face and shoulders, soaking through her clothes. “And here I was convinced you hated all those movies I keep making you watch.”

Stephen, his face slowly flushing red, said, “You’re not supposed to arrive dressed to a shower, Clea.”

“Don’t change the subject.” She began pulling off her tights, because it did seem ridiculous to be standing there in a sopping wet outfit, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing before.”

He folded his arms across his chest as shampoo slowly dipped down the side of his face. “I sing.”

She flung her shirt over the glass wall. It landed with her tights in a wet slop on the tile floor. “When?”

“From time to time. And, by the way,” he said, ducking his head to the side and rinsing the soap out of his hair, “it’s not very polite to surprise people in the shower like that.”

“Mhm.” She threw the rest of her clothes over the door, placed her hands on her hips, and looked up into his face. “And all that complaining about my film selections?”

A small grin spread across his face, crooked and full of mischief. She didn’t get to see that expression enough. He reached out and brushed his thumb across her cheek. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello, Stephen.”

“You look radiant, my love.”

“I know.”

“Okay.” He paused. “You want me to wash your back?”

She smirked and leaned away from him, trying not to hit the cold glass behind her. “Really? That’s the best you’ve got?”

He shrugged and dropped his chin and looked up at her through his eyelashes, one eyebrow quirking slightly.

She said, “Oh, the signature move.”

“It works.”

She leaned forward just enough to trace the ghost of a kiss across his lips, the tossed her head back. “Not this time.”

“Huh?”

“I want a song.”

“Oh, come—Clea. Be reasonable.”

“Indulge me. I’ll make it worth your while.” Her smile was a wicked one, reflected back at her in his eyes, bright and twinkling like blue stars. She knew she had him then; it was never difficult, once she managed to pry his attention away from whatever dimensional threat or arcane horror he was occupied with.

She remembers the song, and the rough scraping laugh that followed it, a noise like a secret kept between the two of them. He told her later that he sang in a church choir as a child. He frowned and flexed his fingers and said he played the piano, too, that he used to be quite good. She took his hands and kissed his knuckles, one by one, until she could feel the knot in his chest release, if only for a moment. That was all they really ever had, in decades of marriage: moments. Small fractions of time parsed out amidst ugliness and monsters.

She closes her eyes and the scenes replay over and over, her own private movie night with only a threadbare blanket for warmth. She feels less alone now than she did in months where he would stalk his home like a ghost, barely there at all. But perhaps that is only the numbness of an old pain that is quietly fading but never gone.

They’re fighting different wars in different dimensions, but they’re still bound to each other. Still inexorably linked. By magic, by a love that won’t seem to die, no matter how much simpler it might make things. She asked him to end their marriage but he never did and now it hangs open, festering between them like an infected wound, both of them raw and aching. It would be better to be severed entirely, but increasing she doubts that that can ever happen. They were never friends, and they probably never will be.

They will be brought back together one day. They both have lived too long for that to be in doubt. And what will happen then?

She curls into herself, huddled in the darkness of the cave as the rain pelts at the ground outside. She has no answer to that question, no vision of the future. She cannot imagine an eternity without him, but can’t fathom one that includes him, either. There is only the now—the rebellion, the fighting, the ongoing continuation, the constant battle-drum of what is necessary—and the past. Memories that haunt her, that follow her footsteps like a shadow.

She remembers all the words to all the songs and she carries them with her like prayers or balms. She doesn’t speak them but she wears them like a shroud, a pall, a protection again the hollow valley where she and her soldiers hide.

This is, for now, all she has.

 

 

 

end


End file.
